It's the Brian Larry Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone, and happy Earth Day. Later this hour, we will introduce a little Earthweek experiment that you can participate in from home or at work or wherever, just to notice how many times you encounter single-use plastics between now and Friday and which ones you think would be the easiest or hardest to avoid.

One example from the news right now that we will talk about. The New York legislature

is considering a bill that includes many things, including a ban on cheese slices that are

sold as individually wrapped in plastic. Those would be outlawed under the bill that's being

considered now. Also today, we'll have a morning before the first

Seder night Passover conversation with Harvard Law Professor Noah Feldman, author of an ambitious

new book called To Be a Jew Today, a new guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish people. He grapples

with identity, anti-Semitism, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, political and

religious diversity within Judaism and more.

And he will help lead a conversation later in the show that might anticipate some difficult

conversations across generational or other lines within families at a lot of people's

Passover tables tonight, considering

October 7th in Gaza and Hamas and the discord on the Columbia University campus and elsewhere

right now as he takes your calls.

But we start with the news over the weekend that the New York State budget process with

some major policy items that we've been

covering baked in finally got passed over the weekend. So we're going to run down some of the

details for housing, retail theft, education, Medicaid, climate, and how some of these major

debates we've been discussing on the show actually turned out in the end.

So back with us is our WNYC and Gothamist Albany reporter, John Campbell.

Hi, John, no weekend off for you, I guess.

Thanks for doing some Monday morning politics duty with us.

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